Tag Archives: Tech Sharecase

The theme for today’s Tech Sharecase was algorithms and the roles they play in our lives. We started off by watching a TED Talk video by MIT grad student, Joy Buolamwini, titled “How I’m Fighting Bias in Algorithms.”

The discussion among our twenty attendees touched on a number of topics:

Charlie Terng showed how you can use the Shiny package for R to create visualizations of data. He’s been using ggplot2 to put together a dashboard of information about circulation of library books and is looking at how he might use Shiny. He showed us three visualization examples on the Shiny website to give us a sense of what the system can do:

Ralph Englander showed some screenshots of the work he’s done in the iDashboards system to display various metrics from the library. One challenge of his project has been the task of having to manually load data into the system.

Tableau

We looked at the dashboard of CUNY-wide data from library systems that the CUNY Office of Library Services has posted on its free Tableau account.

Monitoring Activity on the Campus Network

Mike Richichi and Phil Tejera spoke about how BCTC uses Cacti and MRTG to keep tabs on the levels of activity on the campus network.

Upcoming Tech Sharecase Events

November 10

December 8

The locations will be announced shortly. Please submit any suggestions for discussion topics on this editable Google Doc.

For our first meeting of the fall semester, we had 22 attendees in the 9th floor conference room sharing ideas about ways to create and manage passwords.

We started the discussion by referring to this recent Wall Street Journal article in which the person responsible for writing a set of long-standing best practices for password creation decided his guidelines needed a complete overhaul:

Some institutions have set up LastPass at the enterprise level, enabling all employees to have their own accounts and to share passwords with trusted colleagues. It was noted that LastPass has struggled in the past year with a security problem that is worrisome for its users.

We talked generally about what makes a strong password and how a long passphrase can actually be as secure if not more so than shorter password with a bunch of random characters, something this xchd cartoon by Randall Munroe illustrates well:

We also talked about the way passwords get hacked by means of dictionary attacks (a brute force method in which a computer throws billions of words from dictionaries in every language at a login) and social engineering attacks in which users are tricked into giving away their login credentials.

It was noted that while two-factor authentication can offer an additional layer of security, it is not without weaknesses, too:

Can be hard to implement at the enterprise level, as it requires every person to do something additional to log in beyond simply typing in a user name and password

We started off our meeting today with a discussion of the recent hack of Google Docs that saw millions of users getting email messages inviting them to view a fake Google Doc. We discussed how Google had taken the step of removing all the suspected phishing emails from people’s inboxes.

Guide on the Side for Library Tutorials

We returned to a topic that has come up in previous Tech Sharecases: the open source software, Guide on the Side, that libraries can use to design information literacy tutorials. Although the CUNY Office of Library Services set up the software on a server a few years ago at the recommendation of LILAC, Hunter College did the same on their own a few years earlier and has some tutorials online (not all of them seem to have been updated yet to match the new library website).

The larger context for the discussion of Guide on the Side are the Flash-based tutorials our library developed with Kognito a decade ago. Some of these continue to be used even though the content is a bit out of date (some of the databases have been canceled and some have been renamed or wholly redesigned). Some examples of our tutorials that could use some attention because they are still being used are the Beginner’s Guide to Business Research and Research for Oral Presentations.

At today’s event, we focused on the ways that we discover things to read online, how and when we do that reading, and how we save items that we want to maybe re-use later on. Among the specialized services and apps we discussed were:

Feedly. An RSS reader that offers a free service for up to a certain number of feeds or a paid service for more feeds.

JournalTOCs. Web service that lets you sign up for email notification of new content in journals you care about.

Zotero. Web service for saving citations and bookmarks and generating properly formatted bibliographies.

Nuzzel. Web service and app for seeing what your friends in Faceboook and/or Twitter are sharing.

I showed a video I made on my phone of how I use Feedly to scan through items in my RSS subscriptions, Instapaper to save things for reading later, and Instapaper to share to Twitter the items that I think others might want to know about.

A couple of us shared our experiences using Slack for communication with a team working on a project or for communication among professional social network. We noted that Microsoft and Facebook each recently released competing products called Teams (Microsoft) and Workplace (Facebook).

Sentiment analysis. Example: The movie review aggregator site, Rotten Tomatoes, uses automated text analysis to look for certain words in online movie reviews so the site can then assign a rating to each review.

Voyant Tools. We looked at the way that the free Voyant Tools website allows fast analysis of text files. Both Jessica and Linda mentioned the ways that they’ve used the service.

Converting Drawings and Symbols

We discussed a few apps and a web site experiment from Google that do interesting things converting images into text:

Pleco. This app converts into English the Chinese characters that you capture with your phone camera or that you draw in.

Photomath. This app uses your camera phone to capture a math problem and solve it for on your screen.

Quick, Draw! The experiment on the web by Google will take your doodle and identify it. Lots of fun!

We watched a video featuring a presentation by Andrew Flowers about how he and his team at FiveThirtyEight use R for analyzing and visualizing data used for news stories. We also looked at some notable examples of data-driven journalism that featured great graphics:

Today we had two fully assembled virtual reality kits to use to try out various Google Cardboard apps. We found the images weren’t always in stereo and the kits themselves a bit flimsy. Some of the apps we tried out:

We learned about a new experimental extension for the Google Chrome browser called Google Tone that lets you share a URL in your browser with nearby computers using an audible tone broadcast from your computer’s speaker.